what i did on my summer holiday by warwick age 32
Well, August is winding down, the politicians are back at work, and schools all over France are psyching themselves up for the big rentrée. This is a country where almost everyone seems to go on holiday at the same time, and in the first week of August, when the aoûtiens are leaving and the juilletistes haven't yet come back, you're hard pushed to find a single shop, restaurant, cafe or news stand which is open.
Now everyone's back, and they've all got the same hounded expression - as though a gigantic cosmic Monday morning is hanging over everyone's head. My next time off will be Christmas in Australia: we've calculated it's just fourteen weeks till we go, which at least sounds bearable. This time last week I was in Washington, trekking round museums with my mouth open and eating regular cupcakes, which seem to be the current American obsession. There is even a programme on the food network where people compete to make the most elaborate cupcakes they can think of while judges shout at them and a voiceover uses words like ‘unprecedented’ - it's like Masterchef for people who know literally nothing about food.
Hannah came back with an entire suitcase full of gluten-free flours and oats from Whole Foods (if you think this is my usual exaggeration in play, you're quite, quite wrong), as well as about a hundred photos of Julia Child's kitchen, where she stood for about twenty minutes with a rapturously covetous look on her face. I liked Washington a lot, but I don't think I'd want to live there. Luckily, we annoyed so many people by singing the Magnetic Fields's Washington DC at the top of our voices while we walked up and down the Mall that we probably can't go back for a while anyway.
While we were there we met up with gnossiennes , who was just as charming and witty as her journal suggests (me: what does ‘gnossiennes’ mean, anyway? Her: Oh, it's a kind of Erik Satie piece. Me *thinks*: I heart you) and on top of that displayed an admirable appreciation for a pulled-pork barbecue sandwich. She was telling me how much she enjoyed meeting up with mutual friends-list stalwart commonpeople in London, and I immediately panicked, thinking, oh my god I bet he's really London and trendy! He probably did some kind of comic turn involving an amusing photo of Boris Johnson, I can't compete with that! But it was great - this is the second time I've met up with someone from LJ and all I can say is planning future trips around bloggers' locations must be a very rewarding way to travel.
The holiday was also a good chance to get some proper reading done. Because it's set in Virginia, I picked up William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner. Has anyone read this? I didn't like it, in fact I became more and more convinced that it's a rather nasty and irresponsible book, but I'd like to talk to someone else about it. Then somewhere in Richmond I got a copy of James McPherson's utterly brilliant Battle Cry of Freedom, which is the one-volume history of the Civil War that I've always been looking for and, despite being some 900 large pages long, often has the kind of narrative drive of a good novel yet is always admirably clear and factual.
Plus, I had a dream about the 1980 cult masterpiece Hawk the Slayer last night. What can that possibly mean?
Now everyone's back, and they've all got the same hounded expression - as though a gigantic cosmic Monday morning is hanging over everyone's head. My next time off will be Christmas in Australia: we've calculated it's just fourteen weeks till we go, which at least sounds bearable. This time last week I was in Washington, trekking round museums with my mouth open and eating regular cupcakes, which seem to be the current American obsession. There is even a programme on the food network where people compete to make the most elaborate cupcakes they can think of while judges shout at them and a voiceover uses words like ‘unprecedented’ - it's like Masterchef for people who know literally nothing about food.
Hannah came back with an entire suitcase full of gluten-free flours and oats from Whole Foods (if you think this is my usual exaggeration in play, you're quite, quite wrong), as well as about a hundred photos of Julia Child's kitchen, where she stood for about twenty minutes with a rapturously covetous look on her face. I liked Washington a lot, but I don't think I'd want to live there. Luckily, we annoyed so many people by singing the Magnetic Fields's Washington DC at the top of our voices while we walked up and down the Mall that we probably can't go back for a while anyway.
While we were there we met up with gnossiennes , who was just as charming and witty as her journal suggests (me: what does ‘gnossiennes’ mean, anyway? Her: Oh, it's a kind of Erik Satie piece. Me *thinks*: I heart you) and on top of that displayed an admirable appreciation for a pulled-pork barbecue sandwich. She was telling me how much she enjoyed meeting up with mutual friends-list stalwart commonpeople in London, and I immediately panicked, thinking, oh my god I bet he's really London and trendy! He probably did some kind of comic turn involving an amusing photo of Boris Johnson, I can't compete with that! But it was great - this is the second time I've met up with someone from LJ and all I can say is planning future trips around bloggers' locations must be a very rewarding way to travel.
The holiday was also a good chance to get some proper reading done. Because it's set in Virginia, I picked up William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner. Has anyone read this? I didn't like it, in fact I became more and more convinced that it's a rather nasty and irresponsible book, but I'd like to talk to someone else about it. Then somewhere in Richmond I got a copy of James McPherson's utterly brilliant Battle Cry of Freedom, which is the one-volume history of the Civil War that I've always been looking for and, despite being some 900 large pages long, often has the kind of narrative drive of a good novel yet is always admirably clear and factual.
Plus, I had a dream about the 1980 cult masterpiece Hawk the Slayer last night. What can that possibly mean?